Few composers seem as remote
and yet as necessary to our age as Beethoven, and perhaps the symphonic
Beethoven in particular. Irony is a foreign word to him; blazing affirmation
and indeed intensity of struggle seem too much for us. Most conductors seem
either fearful or simply uncomprehending of his demands, of the powerful,
indeed overwhelming moral import of Beethoven’s work. Divested of meaning,
reduced to the level of a performance kit - follow a metronome marking, make
the strings sound unpleasant, drive as mercilessly as you can – that nonsense,
which, if not initiated by Toscanini’s cretinous remark on the Eroica (‘Some people say it is Napoleon,
some Mussolini, some Hitler, but for me it is Allegro con brio’), is certainly symbolised by the at best disingenuous
claim to play ‘as it is written’, seems to have reached its ultimate conclusion
in absurdity. If only it were merely absurd; in reality, it is pernicious
beyond words, for no age, least of all our own, can afford to cut itself off
from Beethoven’s message, irrespective of whether ‘mere’ words can ever come
close to expressing that message. We take refuge, of course, in the great
performances of the past: above all, Klemperer and Furtwängler, extraordinarily
different though they may be. Yet, whilst it would be madness ever to forsake
the recordings – or still, in the enviable case of some people, actual memories
– of those conductors, it is an intolerably unhealthy situation when so many of
us find ourselves fleeing from the Beethovenian unity of the concert hall for solitary
reassurance, or at best communion with souls of the dead, proffered by the
gramophone. Words such as these from Furtwängler in 1943, and behind him
Wagner, would be more likely to elicit incomprehension than impassioned debate:

...
refinement, or even only what one might call heightened sensuous culture, is
lacking in Beethoven. He has enough natural sensuousness, but an elevated,
masculine form, Self-indulgence is as far from his nature as feminine loss of
control. What Wagner felt edified by and enthusiastic about in Beethoven was
the massive ‘grip’, that directness and grandiose clarity of expression
unsurpassed in the whole of music, that ‘oratio
directa’, as Wagner calls it ...

The Ninth is perhaps the
sternest task of all, at least for those few conductors today who might be
willing to take on the full interpretative moral burden entailed. It would be
difficult to come up with a keeper of the flame – perhaps Sir Colin Davis, not
least in the light of last
year’s astounding Proms Missa Solemnis
– as likely to rise to the occasion as Daniel Barenboim. Moreover, Barenboim
had a number of trump cards up his preparatory sleeve. First, the very nature,
the very existence, of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, its underlying
philosophy almost an instantiation of the hopes expressed for the brotherhood
of man by Schiller and Beethoven. Second, placing the performance at the
conclusion of a cycle of all Beethoven’s symphonies, each instalment urging on
conductor, players, and audience to greater heights. Third, the example of
earlier performances, though not this, in performing Beethoven’s symphonies in
conjunction with works by Boulez. In Hans Sachs’s words, ‘Es klang so alt und
war doch so neu.’ Beethoven is rarely if ever writing in similar fashion to
Boulez; that is not the point of the comparison. Nor is it enough simply to say
that both musicians as revolutionaries, though they certainly are. But hearing
the very idifferent responses to material necessitated not only by serial
method but also by the æsthetic and, yes, moral dictates of another time helps
bring home to us both the singularity and the universality – somehow,
miraculously, Beethoven’s music can
still speak to us, just as Marx expressed wonder in the case of the art of
ancient Greece – of Beethoven and of his symphonies in particular. Perhaps it
was a pity that the opportunity was not taken to pair another Boulez work with
the culmination of the Beethoven cycle. Imagine, in the Royal Albert Hall, a
performance of Répons, or, failing
that, Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna.
Or perhaps even a new work, whether by Boulez, or by someone else, Walther von
Stolzing’s hour finally striking? One will always, however, be able to come up
with alleged ‘improvements’ and ‘enhancements’, and up to this concert, all but
Beckmesser would have been immeasurably grateful for what they had experienced.
How, then, would the grand finale measure up to such formidable or even impossible
expectations?

There was a bemusing false
start, in which applause greeted – well, no one.Second time around Barenboim appeared, to
initiate a performance with anything but a false start. Time was when one could
speak quite freely of the opening of the Ninth Symphony as a representation –
almost in Schopenhauer’s sense – of creatio
ex nihilo; that time came again, displacing or rather rendering supremely
irrelevant even the slightest thought of positivist pedantry. There would be
throughout the first movement an elemental quality that would be difficult not to
relate to Wagner, far more so, for me, than to Bruckner, despite the obvious
temptation. Though that primæval stirring owed a great deal to Furtwängler, a
Klemperer-like stentorian quality soon revealed itself as a dialectical
counterpart in Barenboim’s reading. (A greater debt to, or better, a greater
sense of commonality with, Klemperer has been one of the especially intriguing
aspects of this series.) Another dialectic, for Beethoven is surely the
dialectical composer par excellence,
perhaps in a sense related though not identical, would be that between a
motivic integrity and network cohesion that was surprisingly Wagnerian with the
tectonic workings of harmony and its demands upon sonata form, Haydn remaining
a powerful presence, however different the scale of expression. The sense of
exposition in the first movement was very strong; ‘exposition’ was not a mere
word, nor an all-too-ready formula. This, despite Wagnerian intimations and
Mozartian echoes – Don Giovanni, in
particular – was emphatically symphony rather than aspirant music-drama. The
coda tested that rule – and how! Its bass line was spine-chilling, terrifying,
its contagion spreading to the entire orchestra. Would humanity overcome (apparent)
Fate?

The scherzo’s kinetic energy
came from within, from deep understanding of harmonic rhythm, not as sadly so
often is the case, as an exhibitionistic importation from without. There was
some wonderfully rollicking brass playing in a movement that exhibited more
gruff Beethovenian humour than might have been expected. The whole was
relentless in the proper sense, harmony dictating that it should be so. Once
again Barenboim’s handling of transition, in this case to the trio, was of an
order rarely encountered today. Wagner once called the art of transition his
most subtle art; one might well have said the same of Barenboim. In the trio
itself, the world of The Magic Flute
seemed to fuse with Pastoral
reminiscences, to create something quite new, an early pre-sentiment of the
emergence of that tune in the finale.
The last recurrence of the scherzo material was all the more powerful for its
lack of hysteria: Klemperer again?

Tempo and formal
understanding were finely judged in the slow movement. Barenboim’s command of
line permitted an almost Gluckian noble simplicity, which yet dialectically
revealed itself to be complexity. If the unfolding variations lacked quite the
heightened luminosity and sublimity of Furtwängler, then Barenboim is not alone
in that; indeed, it is Furtwängler who stands alone. Perhaps wisely, this at least
opened in more modest fashion, yet remained beautifully sung, suffused with
longing – and sheer goodness. More than once I felt kinship with the slow
movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony: a little surprisingly, since I am not
aware that this is a symphony Barenboim has conducted. (I shall be happy to
stand corrected though.) Nevertheless the cumulative
effect of experiencing Beethoven as supreme master of variation form was
powerfully felt. Even when I wondered whether the first brass intervention
towards the end might have been given a little more time, it was the second
time around, the latter thereby intensified.

The celebrated cries at the
opening of the finale were taken at quite a speed, without sounding hurried or
harried. There was real depth of tone to be heard from the cellos and basses in
their responses. The first enunciation of the theme was miraculously hushed:
quite extraordinary. A sense of communion was engendered, as the players’
orchestral brothers – and sisters – joined; the brass entry sent shivers down
the spine and had tears welling up, though we still lacked the word, perhaps
even the Word. There were a couple of points when the music threatened to run
away with itself, but it just about held together, and all was put right by
René Pape’s Sarastro-like entry. His diction was straightforwardly superlative.
more to the point, not only could every word be heard; every word meant
something, and something important at that. The choral declaration, ‘Alle
Menschen werden Brüder, wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt,’ was for this listener at
least, emotionally overwhelming. Words, music, and performance came together as
so much more than the sum of their parts. For the performance given by the
National Youth Choir of Great Britain was as fresh as it was weighty, its
layout – vocal parts dotted throughout the choir rather than split into
sections – heightening the sense of mankind’s variety. I was again quite taken
aback by the high quality of the diction, not an easy matter in which to
succeed in this choral writing. ‘Und der Cherub steht vor Gott!’ was enunciated
more clearly than I can ever recall, and that in an acoustic that really cannot
help. Barenboim held the final ‘Gott!’ for an ecstatically long time, or so at
least it felt. Anna Samuil’s rendition of the soprano part was somewhat
problematical, not only lacking blend but at times quite unpleasant of tone;
Waltraud Meier did a perfectly good job, as one would expect, but one does not
listen to the Ninth for the mezzo, even for that mezzo. I thought Peter
Seiffert was on much better vocal form than I had heard him for some time,
before realising that he had been replaced by Michael König. The ‘Turkish March’
sounded just right in terms of tempi, contrast, and balance. Thereafter, the
return of ‘Freude, schöner Götterfunken’ genuinely lifted the spirits; I could
not help myself smiling, nor did I wish to do so, infected with ‘Freude’. The
questioning, ‘Ihr stürzt nieder Millionen?’ was splendidly mysterious,
imparting a sense of gradual revelation quite in keeping both with Schiller and
Beethoven. The great combination of the ‘Freude’ and ‘Seid umschlungen’ themes
was taken at an exhilarating tempo, full of life, and still full of
expectation, full indeed of joy. Structural underpinning continued, however, to
have a great deal in common with Klemperer’s granitic example. The final accelerandi were of course Furtwängler’s
province, if less extreme. The very particular circumstances that enabled
Furtwängler’s response no longer pertain; this was a Ninth that honoured
tradition but spoke of our present condition, and to an audience of the present
day.

It was a genuinely lovely
touch at the end of the symphony for Barenboim to shake the hand of every
member of the orchestra; it also reminded us that the West-Eastern Divan is so
much more than just an orchestra. A speech was expected and came: succinct,
resolute, even Beethovenian in spirit. Though a forthcoming concert in East
Jerusalem had had to be cancelled, some elements in the Occupied Territories
having objected to the orchestra as a role of ‘normalisation’ – how wrong could
they be?! – the work of listening to each other, the democracy of a musical
society in which every member was an equal, would continue. They might not be
able to change the governments of the Middle East, but those governments would
never change them.